What’s the OCO budget?
Speaking Security Newsletter | Congressional Candidate Advisory Note 10 | 19 May 2020
This is a long one (sorry). I put the stuff most likely to be relevant to your campaign in bold.
Situation
The US military gets funded in two ways. First, through its ‘base’ (normal) budget and through ‘non-base’ (emergency or supplemental) budgets. The latter is where the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget lives.
As you can see in the chart above (via Congressional Research Service), non-base spending exploded after 9/11 because that was the budgetary category funding ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) operations. From Fiscal Year 2001 to FY2019, the OCO budget ate $2 trillion in public funds.
Why it (still) exists
A major reason why the ‘emergency’ OCO fund consumed $2 trillion over this period is simply because it was able to last this long. Aside from the incomplete winding down of US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are three main reasons why the OCO budget still exists.
1. It became a slush fund
DOD sort of behaves like the weapons manufacturers it subsidizes: it’s always on the lookout for funding opportunities outside of the ‘base’ (normal) budget. For defense contractors, this is usually foreign military sales. For DOD, it’s ‘emergency’ or ‘supplemental’ budgets.
OCO is no exception. It provides a way for the administration (and Congress!) to inflate DOD’s budget beyond legal limits (‘budget caps’). The ‘OCO for Base’ creation is the latest/most overt expression of this.
Now it’s stuffed with spending measures well beyond the scope of the War on Terror (a fraudulent idea on its own). With that came the entry of corporate and institutional actors interested in preserving the slush fund. Here are two (failed) legislative efforts that your opponent may have voted against:
A. House vote on amendment to the 2017 Defense Appropriations Act, proposing that no funds in the OCO be used for anything other than ‘contingency operations’ as defined (vaguely) in US law.
B. House vote on amendment to the 2020 NDAA, proposing to decrease funding for the OCO account by $16.8 billion.
2. It became normalized (legally)
Funding for the OCO/GWOT was originally designated as an ‘emergency requirement’ implying that the spending was “temporary” (according to the 1985 Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, Public Law 99-177). The 2011 Budget Control Act amended this law to create a special non-emergency category for OCO spending, thus removing any indication that this account intended to be anything but permanent.
3. It became normalized (rhetorically)
Overseas Contingency Operations is a euphemism for the Global War on Terror. Bush started the bloody thing, but it was Obama who made it sound like a backpacking trip through Europe. The Obama administration rebranded the Global War on Terror as ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’ in its first budget request:
When referring to past budgets that funded the Global War on Terror, Obama categorized this ‘non-base’ funding category as OCO. Below, find a comparison between a Bush budget request and an Obama budget request. Literally rewriting history, here:
Bush budget request:
Obama budget request:
Policy proposal
For DOD’s base budget, I still think conversion is the best way to go. The same could be said for the OCO budget — it’s mostly part of DOD’s revenue anyways:
That said, it would be poetic to have it pushed to the edge of a cliff and burned.
What you don’t want to do is normalize its fraudulent existence further by linking it to pleasant-sounding and (at best) ultimately meaningless initiatives. An example: Ilhan Omar’s Global Peacebuilding Act, which authorizes “a transfer of $5 billion from the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingency Operations budget to the State Department to create a new, multilateral Global Peacebuilding Fund.”
This one took me by surprise, considering it came from Congresswoman Omar’s office. If I had to guess, it was probably authored by someone from the liberal sect of the national security establishment. Never try to please these people.
All the best,
Stephen (stephen@securityreform.org; @stephensemler)